What Did You Bring Me?

It’s rare that I’m asked to re-post a specific Drift. Who am I to argue?

The next time you’re preparing for a meeting with a prospective customer (polishing the slides, queuing up the sizzle reel, practicing the demo and making sure all the “partner logos” are up to date) force yourself to stop and switch customers. Instead of the 36-year-old product manager or the 40-year-old group planning director, I want you to pretend you’re meeting with a five-year-old.

This is not to say that customers are childish or somehow incapable of digesting important, detailed information. No, this is actually not about them at all. It’s about you and how you’re over preparing and ultimately overshooting your target.

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For those who have not yet had an up-close and personal relationship with a five-year-old (or whose memory of that relationship may now be clouded by intervening years) let me describe: this is the human being in its most essential, most honest incarnation. There’s relatively little depth or contemplation, and even less empathy. As she should, she cares about her own needs, her own self-preservation. Before you arrive, she’s probably not thinking much about you at all, and a few minutes after you’re gone she’ll have mentally and emotionally moved on. Now I want you to consider your next sales call as if you’ll be meeting with this five-year-old. How would you prepare differently? Which assumptions would you leave behind? How much faster would you get to the point?

Inside every human – every one of your customers – there’s a five-year-old, complete with all the fidgeting, self-involvement and impatience. Preparing to speak to that primal creature means getting to the important stuff really fast…connecting emotionally….being clear. As an assist, here are three questions that most five-year-olds like to ask, reinterpreted to help you prepare for better customer calls:

“What did you bring me?” They’re not thinking about helping you out or what kind of day you’re having. “What’s in it for me?” is the order of the day. So… bring them something. No, not a sweatshirt or US Open tickets. Right away, first thing, hand them an agenda or a set of insights that specifically about them. Talk about anything else first – your company history, other successful customer relationships – and you’re just spouting “boring grown-up stuff I don’t care about.”

“Where are we going?” Five-year-olds – and customers – want to know what’s next so they can get excited about it. So describe the future: What’s it going to be like when you’re working together? How will things be better? Bring the “shared destination” to life.

“When are we going to get there?” Customers and five-year-olds are both impatient beings. Imagining them asking you this question every 3-5 minutes (as children do) will keep you honest, brief and relevant every step of the way. It’s easy to assume you have more time and attention than you really do. Sticking with that assumption too long will be fatal to your sales efforts.

2 comments

I’ll just build on this great advice with one insight. If you bring the marketer a hypothesis about THEIR business that shows that you have been studying their business and looking at their recent advertising in order to back into a bigger strategy related to their goals or their challenges… if you do that, you only need to be half right. Do not be afraid to be far less than perfect when describing your hypothesis about their business.

Why? Because a marketer who sees you working hard to understand her business STRATEGY is going to be enthusiastic about helping you get from half right to 100% right. They will join the conversation and help make you smarter – informally, they are suddenly giving you a high quality strategic brief much like they give to their creative agency. That is gold.

Use your instincts in the moment but don’t be tempted to quickly segue into how your company and your properties can specifically address what they have shared with you. It’s often better to close by gaining permission to come back in two weeks with a custom proposal that reflects all that they have shared with you rather than to try to close by rushing into the sale too quickly. It’s counter-intuitive to slow down the selling process but this is how you keep the whole engagement feeling like a strategic partnership where you are focused on addressing their needs instead of your own.

If you do get that second meeting with two weeks to prepare, stay on their strategy, use their language and GO BIG. No senior marketer wants to have you come back in two weeks with something that looks small enough that their agency could have handled it.

Agree wholeheartedly! Solve their problem, make it custom, and client FIRST (unless they asked for just a plain old update of your new platforms).

Show them everything and they’ll take away nothing. Target your message and keep to the key details. If you do this thoughtfully, you’ll be able to fill in all those boring details after you’ve grabbed their attention with the custom conversation you just had with them.